He may be only 11 years old, but John Painter has a pretty good grasp of the whole mom job description:

"She manages our finances, makes good food and drives us around," the fifth-grader said. In her spare time, John's mother, Kathleen Painter, "taught me very detailed chemistry science stuff" and still manages to be "funny at times."

Mothers teach us everything from how to use a fork to how to treat other people. For better or for worse, we carry their imprint for life — a fact that keeps both florists and therapists in business. Their recent incarnations have included soccer moms, helicopter moms and, as Time magazine memorably informed us last week, attached moms. The pearls and high heels of 1950s moms — if that was ever reality beyond the "Leave It to Beaver" soundstage — have given way to jeans and Nikes, running shoes being the must-have accessory for anyone who juggles work and motherhood.

Kathleen and Mark Painter play basketball with their sons, Karl, 13, left, and John, 11, hanging on the basket, outside their Broomfield home last week. "She manages our finances, makes good food and drives us around," John said of his mom. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)

Still, conversations with nearly a dozen Denver-area kids and young adults — hardly a representative sample, but an enlightening group nonetheless — reveal that mothering may be constantly evolving, yet eternally constant.

Clearly, though, there are tools essential to mothering now that Dr. Spock would never have dreamed of including in his "Baby and Child Care." One would be the ability to hack into the Facebook page of a child who has un-friended you; another the selflessness to steer kids on a steady course while you navigate a divorce. A valid driver's license is a must.

"We pretty much live in our car," said John Painter, whose schedule of hockey games and soccer practices rarely coincides with his 13-year-old brother's required presence at those same activities.

Advertisement

No wonder 40 percent of working moms told Pew Research Center pollsters in 2010 that they feel rushed always. Only 24 percent of the everyone else, and 25 percent of working dads, felt the same.

In an era in which society is both nagging kids to get outside and exercise and constantly warning parents never to let kids out of their sight, and in which simply sending your kid to the closest neighborhood school can be perceived as an act of negligence, a lot of mom-fatigue comes from walking that fine line between neglectful and smothering.

Blaine Keegan said his mom, Edgewater City Councilwoman Laura Keegan, got it right.

Growing up, Blaine Keegan, now 23, had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made school tough at times. "She was always there to help push me to do it, and it really worked out. I'm really proud of who I am. I'm a good person, and I thank my mother and my grandmother for that."

Nicholas Brown, who is about to graduate from East High School, said he's grateful his parents gave him and his older brother a lot of freedom, but he wishes at times they had gripped the reins tighter.

"My brother and I would come home in tears, saying 'I'm not good at this,' and beg to stop whatever it was. I would always throw a fit and get my way."

Now, he regrets he didn't tough it out more, especially in team sports that might have encouraged physical development and self-discipline. "It's good to let kids make personal choices, but once they do, it's important to have them stick with it, at least for a while."

The technology that consumes teenagers now may open a world of questionable Internet sites and secret texting, but it also confines them to a short leash.

No more can teens stumble in hours past curfew and pull out the old "we-ran-out-of-gas-and-couldn't-find-a-phone" bit. Most of them have had their own phones since they were old enough to carry a backpack.

The Pew Research Center revealed last month that 75 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds now own cellphones; about 88 percent of them text.

Giulia Gurevitz,18, says her mom's presence on Facebook isn't a big deal, "Because A, I don't put that much on Facebook that's scandalous, and B, I just tell my mom a lot." (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

Moms who want to keep tabs on kids need to keep up.

Sixth-grader Parker Wittlief said that when her mom, Alesa Wittlief, went to Costa Rica for a month-long yoga retreat recently, they kept in touch by e-mail and daily texts to tell her goodnight.

And then there's Facebook.

"At one point I deleted her because I was worried about the things she saw," Giulia Gurevitz said of her mom. She's not sure, but Giulia, an 18-year-old senior about to graduate from Denver School of the Arts, thinks she re-friended her mom. "Because A, I don't put that much on Facebook that's scandalous, and B, I just tell my mom a lot."

As she prepares to head off to the University of Rochester, there is much she will miss about her Brazilian-born mother, her younger brother and her mother's partner, whom Giulia refers to as her stepmom.

She won't however, miss her mom's music.

"I grew up with my mom making me listen to disco. ... It's OK; I've dealt with it," Giulia said. Her own tastes run more toward hip-hop — and the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd.

The rock music and weird hair that made teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s seem like invading aliens to their parents can actually bind this generation and its parents.

Kelli Wiley and her mom, Katie O'Brien, even have tickets to see James Taylor together. When Wiley and her boyfriend split a couple years ago, it was her mom who drove to Boulder, fetched her daughter and brought her to Denver and helped her launch her new life.

Wiley, now 24, not only moved in with her mom for a while, she actually hung out with her.

"She'd say, 'We should go to happy hour. I'm not going to let you sit around and mope," and convinced her to run 5Ks with her.

Seeing her daughter hurting after the breakup was "gut wrenching," O'Brien said, a feeling she knew all too well after her own divorce.

O'Brien said it was important to be there for her daughter — something she did not learn from her own mother. O'Brien said her mother has never talked to her about her divorce.

Back in the late '60s and early '70s when O'Brien was growing up in a large Catholic family, "Nobody communicated. If something was bothering me, my mother was last person I'd ever go to."

Sonny Apodaca, a 19-year-old sophomore and teacher-in-training at the University of Northern Colorado, had a very different experience with her mother, Aurita Apodaca.

At the Apodaca house, the message was, "If you have anything you want to talk about I'm here for you. One of my friends got in trouble for drinking. I was really young and my mom told me about her experiences with that and how that affected her."

For Wiley and O'Brien, that closeness came later.

When Wiley was in high school, "we really didn't like each other very much," partly due to Wiley's penchant for throwing keggers at their house when her mom was away.

The turnaround came when Wiley was a sophomore in college. "I moved into my own house and had people over. They really disrespected my house and I was really mad the next day. I think then it hit me: This was how my mom felt, but she didn't get to have the party, she just had all the fallout," Wiley said.

"So I called her and told her I was sorry I'd put her through all that."

That phone call is not exactly Tim Tebow buying his mom a necklace of diamonds in the shape of a key — symbolizing that she was key to his success — as he told the "Today" show he did when he got his first Broncos paycheck.

Missy Franklin, Jenny Simpson, Adeline Gray and three other Colorado women could be big players at the 2016 Rio OlympicsWhen people ask Missy Franklin for her thoughts about the Summer Olympics that will begin a year from Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro, she hangs a warning label on her answer.